e-Books Pricing - Revisited

Booksquare noted that a boycott's underway:  A cadre of 'revolutionaries' won't buy e-books priced over $9.99, and they've even 'blacklisted' them on the Amazon website.  This is a phenomenon I mentioned in a previous post.

I'm not willing to boycott, exactly.  And I'm a writer.  I know I want to get paid for my work.  But, if I'm completely honest, I do consider price when I'm seeking something new to read.

It's not that I don't want publishers to recover their costs, and it's not that I don't want writers to get paid.  It's that, like so many readers of e-books, I'm having a little trouble understanding the hidden costs of e-book production, the factors that would inflate the cost, when simple people with a little computer literacy can create, produce, market and sell our works ourselves, right from our own home offices.  It can't be distribution costs; how much does a file transfer really cost?

That's one of the reasons why, instead of boycotting, I'm merely avoiding those online sellers that price e-books like hardbacks, even though I can read on my Palm device and on my Kindle.  I shy away from paying "full price", whatever that means, and move toward sites that charge the going rates for paperbacks.